Last night at Ottawa’s Fresco Cielo, Qumana evangelist Jon Husband spoke passionately and insightfully about blogs and organizations as part of the Third Monday speakers series organized by Joe Thornley and and Ian Ketcheson (who hosted the evening).

Jon’s extensive experience in organizational change management informed his vision of how organizations must evolve in order to avoid becoming knowledge dinosaurs (my term not his, but that was the general idea). The future, as Jon clearly explained, lies in organizations using social media to become learning organizations, so they can a) take advantage of the knowledge that is already embedded within their organization but is so often wasted; b) become more responsive and nimble in terms of taking advantage of rapidly changing economic landscapes; and c) attract and retain young talented workers who simply will not put up with management practices that are based on command and control. To some extent we all recognize that this is not a new message (Jon talked about a bank that had hired him briefly as a consultant 5 years ago and that is facing the exact same issues today and still hasn’t been able to respond) but it remains as true as ever, and more and more dangerous to ignore.

Young workers who are ‘digital natives’ expect to collaborate, iterate, create and share with relative autonomy, and they have shown themselves to be very productive when doing so. The challenge organizational leaders face is that they themselves are often not good at these things and are afraid of them, yet unless they promote them within their organization they are risking their future. It’s a difficult paradox and one that can really only be overcome with the help of knowledgable and caring professionals (like Jon, Joe, Ian and others) who can accompany organizations as they grudgingly commit to reinventing themselves in the networked 21st century.

The other theme that Jon emphasized and that really resonated with me was the notion of the generation gap (again my phrase but this was the general idea Jon spoke to) which has serious implications for organizations and for society at large. As boomers retire, networked kids grow up, technologies improve and broadband speeds and penetration rates increase, the challenge of bridging the gap between what older and younger people know and do becomes increasingly important. I wrote an article about this subject recently. It’s online here: Stopping the Copyright Wars of 2017

Thanks for the talk, Jon. Good luck with Qumana,
John Sobol